


Forget the Rest, Remember Me

by Holly (spaciousbear)



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Red String of Fate, Soulmates, Time Loop, a hint of magical realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:55:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25677679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaciousbear/pseuds/Holly
Summary: The first time Eiji dies, Ash almost doesn’t notice the door. It’s strange, because he’s sure they were trapped here just moments ago and he’s taken stock of all the locked exits, but there it is - a door ajar, without a lock or a guard, just blackness behind it.When Eiji dies, Ash gets another chance to save him. And then another.Ash keeps going back to the beginning until he can get things right.
Relationships: Ash Lynx/Okumura Eiji
Comments: 15
Kudos: 130





	Forget the Rest, Remember Me

**Author's Note:**

> I unabashedly love time loop stories. I also love subverted "fix-it" stories where the characters are only ever making things worse for themselves. Poor Ash has to deal with both here.

The streets blur around Ash in streaks of black and gray. Buildings around him, pillars of concrete and glass, might have felt like a maze to anyone else, but Ash knows them too well. He moves on instinct. 

It doesn’t take him long to catch up with Arthur’s men - he knows where they’re going. When he reaches that familiar hideout by the pier, he dismounts the bike, leaves it where it falls. Probably won’t be able to get it back now. Fuck - he’ll have to make that up to Shorter somehow. 

That doesn’t matter now, though. Now, they have Skip, they have that innocent kid from Japan, and he has to _do_ something about it. 

Arthur’s already waiting for him when he arrives, face practically cracked in half with the mad grin that’s settling across it. He demands Ash’s gun, orders his men to aim at the frightened Japanese boy who, less than an hour prior, had admitted that he’d never even seen a real gun in person before that day. Ash considers his options, tries to think of an out. He considers just for a moment too long. 

A sickening familiar crack of a gunshot rings in his ears and Eiji’s body falls at his feet. Still, broken, lifeless.

It’s over before he can process the moment, before he can differentiate between the red of Eiji’s button up and the red pooling out beneath him. The boy is dead and there’s nothing he can do for him. Ash needs to refocus his attention, needs to figure out his next steps, but he can’t. He doesn’t understand why, but it feels like a weight’s sinking in his chest, like there’s an unending hole in his heart. 

Arthur takes him and Skip inside to lock them up. Ash doesn’t resist, even as Skip kicks and fights with every bit of strength he has. Ash doesn’t understand the spreading emptiness that overtakes the core of his being as he sits there and waits. For whatever Marvin and Arthur have planned. Somehow it seems to matter less anymore. Everything does. 

Skipper is still there, watching him mournfully. Keeps saying what a shame it is, how much he liked that Eiji kid, tried to keep him out of the way, that he’s awfully sorry things turned out this way. His voice is a distant echo, and Ash drifts further and further away from it. Ash should be thinking of a plan, should be trying his best to at least get Skipper out of there to safety, but everything burned up in that moment and they’re both as good as dead now.

There’s no escape. For the first time, Ash can’t see ahead to the next step, just a dead end. 

The first time Eiji dies, Ash almost doesn’t notice the door. It’s strange, because he’s sure they were trapped here just moments ago and he’s taken stock of all the locked exits, but there it is - a door ajar, without a lock or a guard, just blackness behind it. 

Once he notices it, he feels a tug, something pulls at the part of him that is quickly withering. It pulls him to his feet, to the door, it draws his hand up to pull it wider and peer inside. 

He’s certain there was never a door there before, certain that the gaping void in front of him appears endless, that this door seems to lead nowhere. He walks through an endless hallway, except that it has no walls, no floor, only further darkness. He should be awed, fearful, curious, he should feel anything other than the emptiness stewing inside of him. 

But there is no fear, there is no concern for what’s ahead, there is no anything without Eiji. 

Ash goes. 

Ash gets to try again. 

  
  


When Ash comes to, it’s bright daylight and he’s standing outside in an open, sunny field. Around him, other children are running, screaming with excess enthusiasm and excitement. It’s their first baseball game of the summer and Ash shakes off the strange feeling that there’s something he needs to remember. He must have just zoned out for a moment. 

Across the field, the new coach offers him a friendly smile and there’s a halting moment when Ash feels a twinge of something that seems like memory. 

(Because there’s a price, of course there’s a price. There always is.) 

He’s seven years old again and he doesn’t know yet that he chose the path that leads him back to the fragment of his soul that he lost. He will, eventually. 

Ash lives his life again. 

When he’s nine, he’s sent away to live with his aunt. Unable to live with the shame of a child like him, his father makes that call easily. 

When he’s ten, he runs away. The world feels too small in tiny, stifling New England towns, and the bright neon lights of the city call out to him like a beacon. 

Deja vu begins to feel as normal a part of his life as breathing. Every moment he experiences he feels as though he’s done it all before. A painful echo, a stain against the tarnished glass through which he sees himself. 

When he’s eleven, Dino takes him in; seizes him from the streets he’d been trying to survive on. One of the first things he tells Ash is how mature he seems, how much older he is in spirit. 

Ash dreams. Sometimes they’re nightmares, times where he feels fresh grief for friends he hasn’t met yet, his mind filled with the familiar faces of strangers. Occasionally the images puzzle him. Stern stone lions perched outside a grand building. The flash of a boy leaping into the air, high, so high Ash is certain he’ll disappear. Sometimes they’re small, fragmented bursts of joy. A face that smiles at him with warmth and understanding, but the details fade the moment he wakes.

He lands back in Cape Cod that one fateful spring every time, a little more of himself coming back with him. Every choice is a path in the labyrinth he wanders, and he walks almost every one he can find. 

Sometimes, the only thing that keeps him going, keeps him sane, is the gnawing feeling that there’s a light, somewhere, at the end of this darkness. Someone he’s waiting to meet. All he has to do is wait for them to arrive. 

Ash lives in waking dreams, it seems, until a single moment when he’s standing in a noisy, smoky bar and the most unusual person catches his eye. Until the moment he speaks with Eiji Okumura for the first time, the phantom from his dreams made flesh. Only then does he wake up and realize he’s done this before. Only then he remembers. 

He knows when he walks through the door what he’s choosing to go back to. 

He chooses Eiji every time. 

* * *

Initially, Ash tries to save them all. 

For Skipper, he tries to bargain. He offers Marvin his body, information, whatever it’ll take to let the kid go after Eiji escapes, and Marvin almost gets close to taking him up on it. Arthur’s too sharp to let him go, sees too easy of a mark in Skip to give it up so easily. Ash is never quick enough to push Skipper out of the way before the bullet slices through him in an arc of crimson. 

Max is killed, though the circumstances vary. A quick blade to the throat while attempting to step between Ash and one of his would-be attackers in the prison. Later, shot a dozen times by Dino’s men while trying to rescue him from the hospital after his fight with Arthur. When Max is captured by Foxx, sometimes he returns, alive and with a renewed vigor for life in his eyes. Sometimes his body is removed from the scene in a body bag, and somewhere in the distance he can hear Jessica sobbing as Charlie delivers the news. They don’t even let her see the body and Ash can’t blame them. He can only look away, sickened by the iron smell of blood and death; scents he’d grown too used to.

With Shorter, Ash initially can’t accept that by the time his friend was injected with the drug, he was already dead in every way that mattered. 

It’s the brief, harrowing glint of awareness in his eyes that does him in; Shorter asks Ash to help him and Ash hesitates. Not long, but a split second is enough time for Shorter’s knife to find itself buried to the hilt in Eiji’s chest, and even after he falls it takes him several slow, painful minutes to die. Echoes of the rasping, fragile rattle as Eiji struggles to take his last breath follow him, as does the splintering spiderweb of blood that spreads beneath him. 

He learns, eventually, that a shot through the heart is kindest to everyone. 

The first time Shorter dies, Ash almost wonders if he’ll get another chance, briefly looks for his exit. It never appears, even as they’re dragging Eiji away to an unknown fate and collecting Shorter’s corpse from where it fell. Of course not, Eiji’s different. Even then, in the heat of his overwhelming grief, Ash can feel it. 

With the growing flames of Dino’s mansion rising around him, with the corpse of his best friend dissolving into cinders, he sees Sing’s face for the first time again and again. It would be easy to end this now. He can see already how pained he is for a boy so young, how noble, how _good_. 

He doesn’t have to die. Even as Sing approaches him, angry and ready to be killed on mere principle, Ash can’t let him. 

“Fuck off,” he snarls at Sing’s challenge. “Come back in ten years.”

Sing dies only once. 

It’s almost the aftermath but not quite. Foxx and Dino are out of sight but not quite dead, not yet. Ash finds Sing hanging over a ledge, wreckage surrounding him, the proof he needs in one hand dangling below and the other gripping Ash like a lifeline. He’s tired, too numb to realize, and in a moment of weakness he lets go of Sing’s hand. He watches as he plummets to the ground below, and Ash clutches the proof of Banana Fish in his hands instead. 

He’s gotten everything that he’d set out to and all he has to do is try not to think about it. Not think what Shorter would say, what Eiji would make of him now. Not linger too long when he catches his reflection and realizes that he is the ruthless killer that everyone makes him out to be. He has to believe it was for the best, that this was the only way. 

It doesn’t matter anyway. This time, Eiji’s wound gets infected, his stitches pulled out by his attempt to follow Ash out of the hospital and he’s dead before Ash even makes the choice. 

Ash can’t fathom the number of people he’s killed; thousands, probably. Across lifetimes, as Dino’s enforcer, by his own hands. As a witness, watching events play out passively, because he knows what will happen if he intervenes. The ones he didn’t think fast enough, move quickly enough; the ones through inaction. There are so many that he’s forgotten most of them. 

He never forgets the look in Sing’s eyes, it haunts him in a way none of the others do. He dreams about it, long before he’s ever met the boy, and he’s determined to never see that expression again. 

Even in a world of infinite permutations, certain things cannot be changed. He’s never been able to save Skip. He can never save Shorter. 

But there’s hope for Max, there’s hope for Sing. 

Maybe that means there’s hope for Eiji too.

* * *

New York can be cruel, cold and unwelcoming to the lost, but it’s not without its spots of warmth. Places where one can rest their head and take respite. And Ash is a curious creature, always seeking to learn. 

He finds the New York Public Library naturally becomes his sanctuary, a restful place that puts him at ease. Peaceful, if nothing else, and if there’s any better place to find answers, Ash is certain he hasn’t come upon it yet. It has the greatest breadth of literature on any topic he can think of and unable to explain what’s happening in any other way, Ash seeks what he always wants the most: knowledge. 

At a loss for exactly what he’s looking for, Ash peruses tomes of just about everything he can think of. First, he starts with religion. When that fails to provide answers, he moves on to theoretical physics, and he’s several volumes into Hugh Everett’s theories before philosophy calls to him instead. 

Later, he cracks open another book. Myths and fairy tales, mostly. In one book, he reads about the Japanese tale of the red string of fate. He remembers the way the door tugs at him, like he’s a dull marionette, only animated by its pull. 

Eiji sits at the table across from him, his eyes alert and fitful with interest in what Ash is doing, flitting between the comics he’s pretending to pay attention to and the dense texts just across the way. 

“I don’t really understand what you are trying to find in all of these books,” Eiji muses one day, and it’s like being doused with a bucket of cold water because it’s just another check mark on the list of things Ash can never answer honestly. 

Instead, he peers out at Eiji over his glasses with a smirk. 

“Just feel like reading about it. What’s it matter? Are you bored? I can give you some money to go buy yourself another comic.”

Eiji ignores the comment and watches the way Ash’s fingers dance over the pages, bending them over nervously. 

“I just don’t understand how any of this has to do with fighting against Dino?”

Ash closes his book, then, and gives Eiji a gentle smile. 

“Hey, let’s go get some lunch and take a break from this, okay?” It’s enough of a diversion to end Eiji’s immediate line of questioning, but Ash sets aside the book to peruse further. 

Late that night, Ash is the one who brings it up again. He thinks it over, Eiji lying in the bed just across the way. 

“Hey Eiji,” Ash says, intuiting that he’s still awake. “Have you ever heard of the red string of fate?”

A small bit of movement as Eiji shifts his attention towards Ash. 

“Mmm. Yes. It’s a common story in Japan. Mostly for superstitious people.”

“Do you believe in anything like that?”

Eiji raises his head finally at that, turns it to look at Ash. His face seems set, serious, and there’s a little bit of worry in his eyes. 

“No one’s fate is set, that’s ridiculous.”

Ash nods in response. Of course it’s ridiculous. He laughs softly.

“You guys sure have some weird ideas in Japan,” he scoffs. A second of hesitation and Eiji laughs gently. In the night, his eyes are glittering dark gems. 

“Maybe we do. But it is only a story, Ash.”

It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t find the answer the first time around, even the second or the third. The library is like a living thing to him, a friend that might share its secrets in time. He’s sure that the answer is there somewhere, hidden within the confines of those walls. 

* * *

If the red thread is what binds, then Ash imagines there must be other colors, other chances. If souls are interwoven threads of possibilities, then Eiji is the most beautiful tapestry of potential Ash has ever seen. But when enough strings break, the edges become frayed. When someone tugs hard enough, often enough, at those remaining threads, things begin to unravel. 

Ash knows well enough that red stains everything. 

Details change; subtle, at first. Ash always meets Eiji, a photography assistant on an assignment, a boy who’s traveling to America as part of an academic program in his college. A mother, father, and a little sister he speaks fondly of. 

A boy who’s pursuing an art degree after his initial athletic scholarship fell through. 

A boy whose injury threw his academic career off track and just needed to get away to escape his depression. A father whose health is rapidly deteriorating, a mother he barely mentions, a sister whose name he never says. 

His eyes are a little duller, and his story is a little different. At times, Eiji stops talking about himself at all and Ash searches, desperately, for that lost spark, a glimmer of the joy he knows is possible. 

Eiji cries when he thinks no one is listening. Ash can hear him, in the middle of the night, or a quiet breakdown while cleaning, unaware that Ash has slipped into the room behind him. Those are the worst times of all because it’s then that Ash has to wonder, because he can swear it’s almost as if Eiji is aware, that some part of him remembers too. 

Ash doesn’t know. He never asks. 

What he does know is that he draws Eiji in a little closer each time. Eij’s fearful trepidation about the violence coloring Ash’s world bubbles over into curiosity. Eiji’s placid and pacifist demeanor wears down and the edges where he’s broken get a little sharper. He accepts the violence in Ash’s world like it’s nothing, unflinching in his eagerness to help. Ash can’t help but wonder if he’s tarnishing Eiji in a way impossible to recant. 

At times it even feels like Eiji is starting to enjoy it; a moth drawn to the dangerous flame that flickers inside of Ash, that he’s eager to be burned up in its warmth. 

Death is a heavy thing and Ash can only hope that Eiji can’t remember the way he can. 

The only thread that keeps Eiji anchored to this world at all is the one that connects them together. Maybe once it was a bright color, but Ash tugs at it time and time again with his blood-stained hands. And Ash knows, better than anyone, that red stains everything. 

A boy who died a hundred times and can feel every last one of them weighing on him at once. 

Ash can fix this. He has to. 

* * *

Even as the pull of each cycle leaves him feeling more helpless, Ash allows himself a few indulgences. That first taste of Eiji’s lips at the prison, he gives himself that much, just in case he doesn’t get to see him again this time. They’re soft and sweet and he enjoys remembering them each time. 

If he manages to make it long enough to see Eiji alive again _(sometimes Arthur gets to him first, sometimes Shorter doesn’t make it in time to help him)_ , he tastes those lips a second time, a third. He feels the peaceful serene morning where Eiji wakes up next to him, both unclothed and dazed. That morning, Eiji brews them both coffee and they sit just beside the window overlooking New York as the sun rises. Neither of them needs to say a word. 

The very first time they embark on their cross-country trip, they explore. They kiss under the stars in Cape Cod, away from the prying eyes and expectations of the people around them. He takes Eiji along the beach and they discard their shoes and walk along the rocks as the waves lap at their feet. They climb to the top of a lighthouse after hours and Eiji takes at least a hundred photos of the sky, of the sea, and of Ash. 

It’s the first time Ash can ever remember smiling for a photo. 

Months pass peacefully. He gets cocky, too confident in his ability to navigate a future that hasn’t been written yet. Ash refuses to turn over Max’s research, refuses to cooperate with Dino’s demands. He’s holding all the cards, he knows everyone’s moves before they even do. Even at his worst, he’s certain he can best Dino.

It’s a crisp fall day in New York when he gets so comfortable he lets Eiji walk himself home from the library. When Ash gets back, it’s quiet. Too dark, too still. There’s no sound of movement, scent of food cooking, no signs of life at all. 

Eiji’s body is left in the condo for him to find, laid out along the bed like he’s sleeping. Dino wants Ash to learn his lesson, orders his men to make a show of it. Ash lets his finger trace along the line of his lips. Cold, now. For one last time, he presses a kiss against them, before he tries again. 

The one thing Blanca does for him, at the very least, is that it seems to have been quick and painless. 

At first, he doesn’t expect Blanca to get involved. People still manage to surprise him, even then. 

Lifetimes pass before Ash can look his mentor in the eyes again, even more before he can trust him. Eventually, Blanca can learn, eventually he understands, but Ash never can shake that initial fear that takes him in his presence. 

* * *

It takes Ash a hundred times at least before he finally figures it out.

He sits outside, relieved that Eiji is going back to Japan, finally free, finally about to sever that bond. He’s survived this far, even the gunshot that’s taken him so many times, and Ash keeps his distance, certain that a mere glimpse would undo everything. 

It’s that comfort, that knowledge of Eiji’s safety that does him in, in the end. He knows that Eiji wants him to follow, knows that he wants to follow as well. Japan. He turns the word over in his mind, imagines what it might be like to go there, to settle into that quiet life he’s dreamed about. He never will. He can’t allow himself that, or else everything he worked for will be in vain. 

He’s won this time. It’s enough for him. It has to be. 

But maybe he can say goodbye. He mulls it over, deciding if it’s really safe enough to go to the airport before he’s gone. Dino’s dead. Chinatown has more than enough issues of their own, and Ash is no longer of any concern to them. 

Lao finds him just as he starts to sprint. Ash barely has time to perceive the glint of his blade before it’s sliding between his ribs and he understands. Even as he reaches for his gun and makes his retaliatory shot, he understands. 

Maybe this was the best thing, after all. 

Damp warmth seeps through his fingers, slick and unyielding, and Ash’s gut tells him to stave the bleeding, to bandage himself up, and to enjoy his victory. Because he fought so hard to get to this point, to know that Eiji is going to be okay, that he’s going to live a full and happy life, even if they can’t be together in it. 

He understands. 

The vision of the library comes into focus and the sheet of paper - Eiji’s letter - begins to tremble in the air as if being blown by a gust of wind. It calls to him, like the gates to the underworld, the only exit Ash has ever found to the hell of losing Eiji over and over again. 

He’s the cause of it all. And he can fix it, let Eiji live the full life he deserves. 

He stumbles in through the doorway, through the crowd, he doesn’t know if people see him, if people care. Trench closed around himself, he keeps Eiji’s letter close to his heart, and by the time he pulls it back when he seats himself at one of the benches, it’s already coated with blood. 

With every step, that one damning sentiment follows him, Eiji’s final farewell. My soul is always with you. It’s enough to buoy the strength in his legs, to keep him moving. 

A hundred lives he’s lived, while Eiji has had to die. Maybe it’s only fair that for Eiji to live, he’s the one that needs to die. 

He closes his eyes and rests his head against the cool, dark wood of the table. 

He sleeps. 

* * *

Eiji sits in his bedroom, which has been mostly untouched for the past two years that he’s been gone. His door is shut. Behind it, he can occasionally hear his mother’s voice softly coming through, asking him to please come out and speak to her. 

It’s dark. The sun has long set and Eiji hasn’t been able to muster the energy to turn on a single light, and so he stays put, mulling over things in the blackness of night, with only the pale slivers of moonlight to keep him company. 

An hour ago, his phone rang, and he was greeted by Sing’s apologetic voice. _I’m so sorry_ , Sing hedged every statement with, _this was my fault_. 

Eiji doesn’t ask him what he means. He doesn’t care. 

What he does care about is the fact that there’s a door there, in his room, that he’d never noticed there before. He stares at it, blankly, and it urges him to it, like a thrall. Something in his heart tells him that he can fix everything, if he just listens to that small voice in the back of his head saying that Ash is waiting for him on the other side of it. 

It tells him that things can be different this time, it wouldn’t be like all the ones before. This time, Ash doesn’t have to die. 

Eiji goes. 

He gets to try again.


End file.
